On Jun 16, 2007 16:53 +0200, Jörn Engel wrote:> On Fri, 15 June 2007 15:51:07 -0700, alan wrote:> > >Thus, in the end it turns out that this stuff is better handled by> > >explicit version-control systems (which require explicit operations to> > >manage revisions) and atomic snapshots (for backup.)> > > > ZFS is the cool new thing in that space. Too bad the license makes it > > hard to incorporate it into the kernel.> > It may be the coolest, but there are others as well. Btrfs looks good,> nilfs finally has a cleaner and may be worth a try, logfs will get> snapshots sooner or later. Heck, even my crusty old cowlinks can be> viewed as snapshots.> > If one has spare cycles to waste, working on one of those makes more> sense than implementing file versioning.

Too bad everyone is spending time on 10 similar-but-slightly-differentfilesystems. This will likely end up with a bunch of filesystems thatimplement some easy subset of features, but will not get polished forusers or have a full set of features implemented (e.g. ACL, quota, fsck,etc). While I don't think there is a single answer to every question,it does seem that the number of filesystem projects has climbed lately.

Maybe there should be a BOF at OLS to merge these filesystem projects(btrfs, chunkfs, tilefs, logfs, etc) into a single project with multiplepeople working on getting it solid, scalable (parallel readers/writers onlots of CPUs), robust (checksums, failure localization), recoverable, etc.I thought Val's FS summits were designed to get developers to collaborate,but it seems everyone has gone back to their corners to work on their ownfilesystem?

Working on getting hooks into DM/MD so that the filesystem and RAID layerscan move beyond "ignorance is bliss" when talking to each other would begreat. Not rebuilding empty parts of the fs, limit parity resync to partsof the fs that were in the previous transaction, use fs-supplied checksumsto verify on-disk data is correct, use RAID geometry when doing allocations,etc.